Bowl Sold for $69,300 | Lucie Rie

LUCIE RIE (1902–1995)
Bowl
United Kingdom, c. 1989
Glazed stoneware with sgraffito decoration; manganese lip and foot (10 × 22 cm)

Lucie Rie was born into an artistic family in Vienna and grew up within a modernist milieu.

• After founding her own studio in 1925, she quickly came to prominence, blending Neoclassical clarity with elements of Japonisme.

• In 1938, fleeing Nazi persecution, she settled in London. Over the next six decades she devoted herself to ceramics, distilling Viennese lightness and British restraint into a distinctive language: sharp, disciplined lines; pure, undecorated glazes; and surfaces where metallic oxides bleed subtly through the glaze, lending the work a life “as simple as nature.”
  
  While postwar British studio pottery largely revered Eastern traditions, Rie took another path. In collaboration with Hans Coper, she developed high-fired stoneware bodies and glazes, eschewing decorative narrative to explore the essence of form through functional vessels. Her signature black-and-white glazed coffee services and bronze-rimmed vases became touchstones of modernist design.
  
  As a teacher at Camberwell College of Arts, she helped propel studio pottery beyond the confines of craft into an independent art form. Her works are held in the permanent collections of leading institutions including MoMA and the V&A. Through two world wars and vast cultural change, Lucie Rie remained true to a quiet philosophy: let the vessel speak for itself.